The present invention relates to the field of business analytics and, more particularly, to providing direct manipulation of an analytics data visualization within an analytics report.
Analytics often provide key insight into industry changes which companies can frequently leverage to achieve success. Analytic processes can analyze and organize data (e.g., from a database) into human readable analytics reports which can aid business analysts in making critical business decisions. Frequently, reports can be generated from enormous data stores (e.g., Big Data) which can reduce large quantities of data into smaller, intelligible data sets. These data sets can provide a limited amount of analytics data in the form of charts. For example, analytics reports often include a number of static representations like pie charts, bar charts, and line charts which indicate trends in a data set. These charts can be atomic graphical objects (e.g., JPGs, PNGs) which can be presented within a Web document. For example, an analytics report can be a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) document including an image of a sales chart. That is, the charts within traditional analytics reports can be static entities which the user cannot manipulate further without manually refining the queries associated with a given chart. Manual refining typically involves recreating the report which can consume computing resources (e.g., network, storage) unnecessarily. Further, manual refining can be time consuming and difficult for users with no experience in analytics report authoring.
In many instances, analytics reports can be accessed easily as Web documents via a Web browser. In these instances, mobile devices are frequently utilized to view charts and/or graphs of analytics reports. For example, business executives who frequently travel can utilize mobile phones to access pivotal analytics reports. As such, mobile devices which frequently have limited capabilities (e.g., power/processor/screen size constraints) can present major hurdles for obtaining analytics data not presented within an analytics reports. For example, large data sets are often associated with analytics reporting tools and cannot be communicated to mobile devices to perform report creation capabilities. Additionally, many analytics reporting software can be complex server-side tools which cannot be utilized on a mobile device. Consequently, analytics reports can benefit from improved customization and enhanced usability.